This unflinching teen mystery is like Lord of the Flies meets Heathers, and it may have achieved the impossible being the first Netflix series too bleak to binge

With expert handling, high school dramas comfortably earn their place in the TV canon. Its been 20 years since Buffy, and its central conceit that adolescence is, literally, a horror show stands up today, although the teenage experience has shifted to an unfathomable degree since 1997. Similarly, My So-Called Life and Freaks and Geeks continue to be relatable, even though the smartest phone they had to be concerned with was fixed to the kitchen wall. Theres a rich seam of action to be found in the melodrama of school corridors, and Netflixs latest, 13 Reasons Why, attempts to portray almost every aspect of it.

Its also one of those Netflix moments where binge-watching is not beneficial. In the end, the cumulative horror of all these woeful scenarios happening to one girl feels overblown if you watch it in bulk, though I imagine it would have been far more effective in the old way of teasing out the mystery with one instalment a week.